TRANSCRIPT
Over the past 10 years, I’ve made a number of videos for this YouTube channel on the subject of Fred, a person I admire greatly. Well, now that he has finished writing his autobiography, in which I appear as a character toward the end, I thought I’d like to interview him and ask him what message through this book he wanted to share with the world.
I realized through the writing that I really was different from the norm, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think there’s a bunch of us who, through the courtesy and grace and mystery of evolution, are born with a greater capacity for consciousness than the norm. It took me really almost my lifetime to discover this. I wondered why I didn’t fit in with my family or the gay community. I left that, or the regular world of the norm. I didn’t fit.
Through the process of discovering that and writing my story, I discovered that evolution, through its mystery, had chosen me to be a more conscious person than the norm. I don’t feel I’m alone with this. Some of us are born with this greater capacity for consciousness. I feel life wants to know itself through its evolving creation, and that’s me.
With that title, “Born Better,” were you afraid that you might alienate people? I mean, it’s a very, again, a very strong title. Rock on, a strong title. You know, um, yes, of course I thought, oh, well, I even got some feedback. Well, isn’t that a little harsh? Isn’t that a little, um, grand? Uh, arrogant even? Arrogant? Wasn’t that arrogant?
Well, I think to really become a self takes a lot of courage. And also to discover that I was given this gift by life, I just had to be courageous and admit it. The reason I’m out with this video and wrote the book was, and I say it in the last line, I hope it helps you. I hope it helps other people who are born better, who have no role models, a lot of negative role models to compare to. Well, now I’m giving people, hopefully, permission to accept that they are part of evolution and they are born better. They are more conscious than their families and the world around them, so they’re not alone.
I think so much of my life I felt very alone, but it didn’t stop me. You know, in my life, I’ve had, um, my first job, I wrote radio commercials. So right off the bat, I was a writer, but learning a skill. But I took dance lessons at night from these major modern dance figures, M. Cunningham, Alen Nikolai of the day, and I got in a major modern dance company. So suddenly I was touring the world.
Then I realized, wait, this wasn’t enough for me. I was like, wait, being at the top in the dance world isn’t enough. It wasn’t. So I left, and I started writing plays. I started with Greek tragedies. The first one was “Ephah,” where the father kills the daughter to go to war. A parent kills a child to go to war. So I thought, hm, looking back, I felt my parents wanted me dead by sending me to Vietnam, for example. But it was unconscious.
Then the next one—
Interviewer: And you didn’t go to Vietnam? Speaker: I didn’t go. I refused to go. I refused to go. And then I went to Canada to expatriate. And while I was in Quebec City, I discovered I was gay, and that was a great gift of identity. Which, whether you’re gay or straight or whoever you are, you have to find your identity separate from your family, separate from the culture. I became real, and it was foundational. It wasn’t the end of my self-discovery, but it was the beginning.
I didn’t have to go to Vietnam because gays couldn’t be in the military back then. And, uh, so I could come to New York, pursue my dance career, and then after that, pursue my career as a playwright. And the second big play I did was called “The Electromyth.” And perhaps, as you remember from Greek mythology, Electra and her brother Orestes killed her mother. So I needed to kill my parents in my psyche, meaning they mustn’t rule my existence.
I don’t think this applies just to gay people. I think it applies to children coming out of families where you want your parents’ approval, you want their love, and yet so often they don’t love you. They don’t see you for you; they see you as extensions of themselves, their own narcissism, their own grandiosity. They think you belong to them. Well, I’m here to tell you, you belong to you. And that’s what I discovered about me. I discovered that I not only belong to me, I belong to life, and I belong to life’s evolution.
If you look at the world today, this is not the culmination of evolution. This troubled humanity that wants to kill each other and exploit each other and make money over morals. It’s really an ugly world. That’s not evolution’s endpoint; it’s still going on. And I discovered that evolution is my calling, is my friend. I am evolution’s student, and I am evolving. And I’m 76, and I’ll be 77, and I’m not done. I’m still evolving.
Eventually, you became a psychotherapist. Can you talk about that a little bit and maybe your feelings about psychotherapy?
I discovered I had a healing gift that is part of my being born better. I have this gift of empathy that I can join in with people and insight too, an insight. And when they come in and they said, “Oh, I did this and that with my background,” I said, “Yeah, me too, and worse. I didn’t kill anybody. I thought about it, but I didn’t kill anybody.” But I have empathy and insight, and I think we’re here on Earth to share our gifts. And I don’t use it as a power play over my clients. I call them clients, not patients. I don’t have a medical model. The brain’s not broken; the brain, the heart is broken. People have broken hearts, not broken brains. So I try and heal the broken heart, the brokenhearted. My heart was broken in childhood, and now my heart is open. I have an open heart, a broken open heart, and from that open broken place, I encourage others to grieve their past with their parents and move into joy. The end of grief is joy, life renewed, a person being real.
So yes, I have a natural gift as a healer, and it started with healing myself.
So let me just ask, to wrap it up, any final thoughts about your book, about life, about anything?
Well, I think writing it was a form of self-discovery and self-love. So I always encourage everybody to write, and I journal every day. But I encourage people to write. It’s a wonderful way to externalize your life experience and look at it and discover who you are. I really think life wants to evolve, and some of us are born better, meaning we have greater consciousness, and we can evolve to serve life, not the limits of our families and society, but to serve life. And I wish you to serve life and its evolution to truth.